Money’s tight

It is often the everyday that illustrates the story. My cab driver the other Saturday told me that late afternoon the day before he had spent 45 minutes looking for a fare. The problem, he averred, is that aren’t spending: or not the ones who would usually call a cab. It seems that M&S have had the same problem with selling food.

Priority fruit

If you have read my blog before, you will not be surprised that I don’t agree with Penelope Trunk’s views on BlackBerries, found through another excellent post on Law 21, Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers, but her post Stop blaming your Blackberry for your lack of self-discipline is still worth reading, if only because it promotes the myth of the multi-talented, multi-tasking Generation Y-er

If you want to see a whole generation make great choices about their priorities using the Blackberry, then latch onto Generation Y. They have been managing multiple steams of conversation simultaneously for more than a decade, so they are aces at it. And they are fiends for productivity tips. The most popular blogs are productivity blogs, and David Allen is a rock star in this demographic. So young people are constantly using prioritizing tools to make their information and ideas flow more smoothly for both work and life, back and forth, totally braided.

Blackberries are tools for the well-prioritized. If you feel like you’re being ruled by your Blackberry, you probably are. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is to start prioritizing so that you know at any given moment what is the most important thing to do. Sometimes it will be the Blackberry, and sometimes it won’t. And the first step to doing this shift properly is recognizing that you can be on and off the Blackberry all day as a sign of empowerment.

Penelope is obviously one of those people who takes her BlackBerry to bed (you will have to read the full post to know why) but she is right about prioritising, and time management is one of those 6 new skills now required of lawyers (although I am not so certain that this is really a new skill: it is perhaps more that the pressure of modern practice means it is even more important).

As for the other 5 new skills required, I will come back to these soon.

Vanity publishing sucks

All too often law firms’ websites (invariably still brochure-ware, however fancy) and their updates and bulletins are more about the law firm and its lawyers, and less about the target audience. At best this is an irritation, and at worse a definite turn off. I know, as I regularly receive unsolicited updates from accountants and property advisers: most of them, if soft copy, are now routed seamlessly into Junk Mail (I have only recently discovered this very useful application in Outlook); if hard copy, they find their way unread into the recycling bin in very short order.

I follow these rules

Think about who your target audience is
Think about what they have told you they want (and not just what you think they want)
Think about how what you are going to tell them will help them (as well as helping you)
Think about what you want to say
Think about the best delivery channel

and then make sure that it only goes to those people to whom it should go (see earlier my post Mailing list hell).

The Gadarene swine

I am not sure which was worse: that MPs decided to keep their allowances or that Gordon Brown and most of the cabinet stayed away, and that a number of senior cabinet ministers voted with the troughing pigs. Only five, Yvette Cooper, John Denham, Jack Straw, Des Browne and Harriet Harman voted for the reform of the arrangements.

See Nick Robinson’s post, Heroes to zeroes?.

Not that long ago, a senior Labour MP, no doubt seeking to put a gloss on the behaviour of her fellow MPs, of all parties, remarked that she believed all MPs went into politics determined to make a difference, and help people. It seems that helping oneself first is what it is really all about. But it was ever thus.

Asleep at the wheel

A damning article by Luke Johnson in this morning’s FT, Bank leaders are a disgrace to capitalism. Johnson reserves his special contempt for RBS,

“Bank directors are not under-rewarded. The six executive directors at Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, took home £16m in cash last year – on top of their accumulated pension entitlements of £26m. These are not entrepreneurs who risk their own capital in life – they are just bank employees. That sort of cash should buy geniuses who never fail. It should pay for leaders who understand the larger role RBS plays in the system, and the vital contribution it makes in financing the private sector, since it claims it has the number one brand in corporate banking.

Yet in undertaking the “largest banking acquisition ever” by buying ABN Amro after the market had begun to turn, RBS has destroyed value and its management credibility on a breathtaking scale. How can they dare to withdraw facilities and berate borrowers when no one has been sacked for such gargantuan incompetence? How do the bosses retain the confidence of their staff, clients and stockholders? RBS was forced into a rescue £12bn rights issue in spite of saying it did not need one. The arrogance of certain of our top bankers is a disgrace to capitalism, while many of the board members of the Big Five appear to have been asleep at the wheel in the past couple of years.”

Yet only a few weeks ago, one of the senior local managers of the bank was telling everyone that the “success” of the rights issue meant that they now had plenty of money to lend. Quite unbelievable.